Works
A focused view of Alex May’s solo works across installation, video sculpture, photography, and computational systems.
Body Building (Burning)
2026
An ash drawing and filmed burning that uses high-rise architecture as a bodily image and turns destruction into a meditation on residue, release, and remembrance.
Khôra
2025
A generative series in which particles drift around hidden structures, slowly building images that feel both emergent and remembered.
Objkt of Time
2025
A 150-part post-photographic series in which images built through bodily movement were released daily, then collected or burned after 24 hours.
Memory Compression
2025
A series of meditative screen works that make digital video compression visible by pushing common codecs until their hidden textures surface.
BLAZE
2025
A collection of live browser-based generative artworks that treat time as a slow-burning process of continual transformation.
ESSENCE
2025
A moving-image work that sets Hokusai's Manga against AI vision systems, exposing how machine seeing strips subjects into labels, fragments, and repetition.
Body Building: Infection
2024
A 3D animated work that imagines immune response as office labour inside a high-rise body, translating microscopic data into a human-scale story of infection.
The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities
2024
A cabinet-like video sculpture that stages quantum biology through compartments, sequences, and glimpses of what cannot be seen directly.
Memory Sculpture
2021
An ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures built from remembered forms, asking how memory reshapes bodies, objects, and the way artworks are documented.
Alchemy of Knowledge
2021
A screen-based video following a speculative device that rises into the atmosphere to gather, process, and return fragments of airborne information.
A Mirror For Remembering
2020
A virtual reality journey through scanned artefacts and museum objects that treats digital preservation as a question of access, care, and survival over time.
Flow State
2018
A public video sculpture that reveals the hidden labour and infrastructures of biomedical research through shifting abstraction and close-up detail.
Grand Theft Memory
2016
A photo and video work that tests what happens when a place is first learned through a videogame and only later encountered in person.
Algorithmic Photography
2016
An ongoing body of algorithmic images and videos that compress several minutes of recorded time into dense, painterly compositions built from thousands of frames.
No Violence To The Sky
2016
A video mapping installation that re-reads One Canada Square through reflections and distortions, using indirect views to examine architecture, place, and change over time.
Sequence Music
2016
A generative sound work that turns DNA sequenced live in the gallery into an audible, evolving system.
Serre Numérique Inauguration
2015
A live video-mapped performance that rebuilds the history of Valenciennes through shifting projection, sound, and modular stage architecture.
Waterlight
2015
An audio and video-mapped sculpture that recomposes years of water footage into a slowly changing environment of reflection and drift.
Painting With Light: Video Sculptures
2014
A participatory exhibition of video-mapped sculptures developed through a three-day workshop, turning projection into a shared method of making with objects, animation, and light.
Room 40
2014
A video-mapped installation that reconstructs GCHQ from public fragments, keeping surveillance tied to uncertainty, absence, and inference.
Wunderkammer
2014
A video sculpture and installation that gathers found objects, projected moving image, and temporary materials into a fractured cabinet-like environment.
Brighton: Remixed
2013
A commissioned video-mapped sculpture that rebuilds Brighton from found objects and filmed fragments gathered across several years.
Painting With Light at the Tate Modern
2013
A 75-minute live video-mapping performance in Tate Modern's South Tank that turns everyday objects into an evolving temporary sculpture.
Smoke and Mirrors Machine
2012
A kinetic laser sculpture that makes secure communication appear only briefly, from the right viewpoint, through smoke, mirrors, and misdirection.
Shadows of Light
2011
An interactive video installation that rewards stillness by slowly turning visitors into layered, dripping silhouettes of light and colour.
994,138
2010
A real-time generative projection work turns wartime casualty statistics into a repeating field of lives, ageing, death, and remembrance.
London Video Street Art
2009
A live site-specific projection that works directly with existing graffiti, turning the street wall into a temporary collaboration between paint and light.